Many enterprises face the problem of how to provision a large number of information systems devices with an operating system. Currently, there are two basic approaches to the problem: (1) creation and installation of a software image for the devices, and (2) use of a scripted installation utility to build an image for each device.
The first approach involves creation of a software image that is copied to each device. This approach is often favored by large enterprises with a large number of devices because it is typically easy and fast to copy an image across a network connection to each device. However, there must be an exact match between the software image and the configuration of the device or the image will be incorrect and likely inadequate for operation of the device. Use of this approach typically requires a high degree of control over the hardware configuration of the target devices. This is difficult to achieve because often even systems of the same model provided by a single manufacturer may have subtle differences, e.g. different model of network interface card requiring different input/output driver software. Often, the image is downloaded and additional administration and maintenance is required to fix the exceptions and fine tune the downloaded image for the particular device.
The second approach involves the execution of an install script on the target device. This install script may require user input to define the configuration of the target device. Alternatively, the install script may search the target device and automatically discover the configuration of the target device. In both cases, the result is an image that is an exact match for the target device. However, execution of the install script may be either time or labor intensive or both, particularly on a large scale